A Message from the President

MESSAGE FROM PRESIDENT MICHAEL D. HIGGINS

May I send my best wishes and congratulations to all those involved in the Galway International Arts Festival as you prepare to celebrate your fortieth anniversary.

Over the forty years of its existence, the Festival has become a key event on Ireland’s cultural calendar and is now recognised as one of Europe’s leading international arts festivals. The Festival, while enabling the showcasing of new and courageous Irish artistic talent, also provides a valuable opportunity to engage and connect with all that is best and exciting in the international world of the Arts.

This year’s Festival programme - inspiring, exhilarating and generous in scope and audacity - illustrates for us of why the Galway International Arts Festival has continued to go from strength to strength.

The Galway International Arts Festival, from the beginning, has sought to give witness to the power of creative exploration; a power that will be so greatly evident this year in the many works which are fuelled by collaboration, fusion or an intersection between different art forms, or between artistic expression and new and innovative forms of communication.

Participants will be invited to venture into new territory, walk down different pathways, to question the world in which we live, and be invited to make new sense of the realities which define our lives.

For its four decades, the Galway International Arts Festival has reminded us that the arts are a crucial vehicle for citizen participation and that good artistic work is an essential part of being human. The festival has enabled the showcasing and appreciation of such artistic work, in the process broadening and deepening Ireland's international reputation as a country and a people defined by its artistic work and enriched by its inventive, creative and original people.

I wish you all a very enjoyable and fruitful experience at the 2017 Galway International Arts Festival.